Content is at the heart of all intranets. Pages, documents, and files populate the architecture with varying degrees of elegance and are managed under different authoring and publishing regimes.

Over time, an organic process somewhere between glacial and viral overtakes the well designed structures (assuming they were there to begin with) and starts to clog the pathways and interfere with the effectiveness of the intranet. You may have watched this process over time or simply inherited it because of a new role, perspective or sense of responsibility.

Regardless of how you arrived here, you are faced with a significant quantity of content, but with little visibility of its structure and make up. Diving into a redesign without this visibility is both daunting and ill-advised.

But where to start?

The standard approach is to list all of the content, carve it up, distribute among assumed owners, remove the unwanted, and after several iterations of this, recombine the list. Valuable though this is in identifying ownership and reducing the volume of content, it many not have added any insight around existing or proposed structures.

When managing larger audits with many hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of items, it becomes increasingly valuable to overlay the standard process with a process to manage the audit at different degrees of granularity. Not only does this provide visibility in a dynamic way, it also simplifies the steps when conducting the design steps to follow.